In the halls of academia researchers are often more concerned about protecting their intellectual property than publishing the truth. Blogging offers a way to respect previous research, mine the information glut, and quickly publish the results. This blog is an experiment in gathering, documenting, associating, and presenting important information about human evolution using only a browser, the internet, and copy/paste techniques. These are not "my" words. I am only the editor.

About Me

I have a BS degree in Wildlife from O.S.U. but most of my education comes from self study. I don't watch much TV because I don't think subjecting myself to all the materialistic and social propaganda is healthy. You can't view the world clearly if you put blinders on.
My conclusions about the literature I cite on this website will be confined to the comments section. Please read those comments if you want to see the insights I have gained from my personal study. An interesting thing happened when I began this experiment. I discovered that bolding the important points of the research I was citing produced a rough summary of the information I could scan quickly, and also provided a easily referenced outline I could use to associate data from different sources using multiple browser windows. This led to a number of personal insights. Learning how to use blogs to data mine effectively can contribute greatly to the spread of global knowledge, and reduce the "information glut" that has accumulated.

Saturday, February 12, 2005

"In all the great apes - and that includes fossil and modern - the large, tusk-like, projecting, shearing canine teeth are used as weapons, and in most of them the main use is in males fighting with other males for access to estrus females," White said. "The earliest hominids lack that adaptation, showing much smaller canines that are not at all chimpanzee-like."

"The implication of this dental difference is that the newly evolved hominids were living in a radically different, less competitive social structure than seen in modern chimps, he said."

"The researchers note two other sites that have yielded fossil hominids from the same 5- to 6-million-year period. One group of fossils found in 2002 in Chad has been named Sahelanthropus tchadensis, while others found at a Kenyan site in 2000 have been dubbed Orrorin tugenensis. All of these fossils are sufficiently similar that they should be included in the same genus as Ardipithecus kadbba, the team argues."

"All the available evidence supports an 'Out of Africa' theory, that humans first evolved in Africa about two million years ago, then spread to other regions of the world," says John Hawks, first author of the paper and now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Utah. "This original population lived before humans colonized regions outside of Africa. In fact, it was the act of becoming human that made these colonizations possible."

"A second reason for suspecting that a population bottleneck led to a rapid genetic reorganization that started the process of human evolution comes from archeological evidence of a series of behavioral changes suggestive of a new adaptive pattern of hunting, gathering and scavenging. "Body size is a key element in these behavioral changes," the authors note, "because of the locomotor changes that large body size denotes, and the increased metabolic resources it requires." These behavioral changes are far more massive and sudden than any earlier changes known for hominids, they point out.""Many details of subsequent human evolution over the period of the ice ages remain unclear, but one certain finding from both anthropological and genetic data is that there was no later time when the size of the human species became small again," says Hawks.

"Previously skeptical, an Ohio State University anthropologist now supports the idea that the minimal size differences between male and female pre-hominids suggest that they lived in a more cooperative and less competitive society. The evidence centers on the extent of sexual dimorphism – differences in size based on sex --that existed among these early primates and what it suggests about the social structure of these creatures."

"Paleontologists knew that there were minimal size differences between males and females since Homo sapiens evolved but the fossil record is so sparse, they were unsure of whether pre-Homo species showed more of less sexual dimorphism."

"The comparison showed that the sex-based size differences among the fossils at Site 333 were no greater than those for modern humans, suggesting that the same kind of modern social structure with cooperating males also occurred in the days of Australopithecus afarensis."

1 Comments:

It's hard for us to imagine exactly what life must have been like for our ancestral humans even one million years ago, much less 5 or 6 million years in the past. I think the closest we can come to knowing what life was like at that time, would be to observe the bonobo in its wild state. We know that the bonobo hasnt changed as fast as even the chimps, probably due to its isolation by the Congo River.

When articles like this one speak of "cooperating males" that probably formed "pair bonds", most of us immediately assume they mean monogamous relationships where the males helped with child care, food preparation, and other "domestic" chores like some modern men today. Nothing could be further from the truth however.

Look at the bonobo. They are forming female-female pair bonds, not male-female bonds. It was the female's evolutionary job to domesticate males enough in our early history so we could eventually form the type of male-female pair bonds we see today. And they are still paying a heavy price in pain and suffering to accomplish that task, but thats mother love for you!

Even with the large increase in female size that occurred when we began cooking our food, the average female is still not capable of overpowering most males. Thus, she still suffers from rape and wife abuse and cannot protect her children from male aggression any better than herself.

Patriarchy is a vastly more aggressive form of social organization than matriarchy, and we are still very new to the reality of it. The Egyptians were the last great matriarchy, and its only been a few thousand years since their transition to the nuclear family.

A thousand years from now humans will look back and see the rise of patriarchy as a population growth period unsurpassed in our evolutionary history. They will see it as a time when men controlled feminine sexuality, and allowed human population and male aggression to get out of control with terrible consequences. We will learn from our mistakes however, and the human race will survive and grow stronger because of them. Perhaps we will even see another great wave of human migration out of Africa.